


Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

by sophiahelix



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alaska, Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/F, Ghosts, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 15:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18995455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiahelix/pseuds/sophiahelix
Summary: Eve’s face is tired, deep purple circles beneath her eyes, and her hair is a tangled mess. There’s a spreading dark stain in the middle of her green sweater, growing as Villanelle watches. She rests her head on her hand like it’s very heavy.“You look like shit,” Villanelle says.





	Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not in this fandom (...yet) but I woke up today with “Villanelle is haunted” in my head and a few hours later this happened. Thanks to someitems for looking it over.
> 
> Title from the Stars song of the same name.

Villanelle is haunted.

She moves to Alaska. “Why am I moving to Alaska?” she asks herself, comically, pulling a comic face, but she still goes. She gets off a prop plane at the Tin City airstrip and walks straight to the red pickup truck waiting for her, keys in the ignition. She’s the only person around for hundreds of miles wearing head to toe designer clothing, Cavalli resort collection 2020, and when she gets to her cabin she’s the only person around for a hundred miles, full stop.

Alaska is boring. Beautiful, but boring. Everything is boring. “Why did I move to Alaska?” she asks herself, less comically this time, but she knows. The red truck wasn’t the only thing waiting for her here.

When Villanelle wakes up, harsh summer sunlight pouring through the open blackout curtains, Eve is slouched in one of the two chairs by the wood burning stove. 

The cabin isn’t much, one big room with a folding cot and a kitchenette stocked with nearly expired canned foods, but there are two low square armchairs, covered in rough red and white plaid flannel that's wearing through at the corners. Villanelle doesn’t like the feeling in here, too much like camping, but clicking through the real estate website was boring and when she saw the two chairs she clicked twice. _Buy Now_.

Eve’s face is tired, deep purple circles beneath her eyes, and her hair is a tangled mess. There’s a spreading dark stain in the middle of her green sweater, growing as Villanelle watches. She rests her head on her hand like it’s very heavy.

“You look like shit,” Villanelle says.

For a moment Eve doesn’t say anything. Then, like there’s a radio delay, the words just getting through, she blinks, slowly. “You think?”

Villanelle sets her jaw, chin sticking out. The face she made as a child, preparing to refuse, to deny. “You should change your shirt.”

Eve smiles.

She doesn’t say anything else, the rest of the day. Villanelle doesn’t get out of bed. She’s not scared, she thinks. She just wants to see what will happen if she lies there, the bar of the cheap folding cot digging right across her shoulder blades, and watches. Eve doesn’t move, though she isn’t still. She shifts from time to time, tucking her legs further beneath her, raising her head to settle it back down on her hand. In the afternoon Villanelle realizes her shoulders never lift, her chest quiet, because she doesn't breathe. In the evening, she realizes the dark stain is much, much bigger. 

Eve never blinks. When Villanelle blinks, she doesn’t know for sure if Eve is still there.

“I’m tired,” Villanelle finally says, when the sun is setting. It’s midsummer so it must be late, though there’s no clock in the room.

“Then sleep,” Eve says. Her voice isn’t hoarse with the long quiet like Villanelle’s. It’s low and rich as ever, sending the old deep thrum of yearning through Villanelle, mingled as always with anger.

“If I sleep, will you still be here when I wake up?”

Eve smiles.

The light wakes her again, early. Eve hasn't moved in the chair. Villanelle’s stomach growls and she decides that today she’ll be hungry. She never lets her body make choices for her.

In the kitchenette she finds a can of pork and beans that looks all right and a can opener, the old-fashioned cutting kind without a wheel. She rips through the metal with vicious joy, watching the ragged edge appear, the thick brown gravy spilling out. 

Villanelle picks up the can, looking at Eve. “Do you want some?” she asks. “I could cook a better breakfast than this, but this is all that I have.”

“You could never truly nourish anyone, because you’re empty inside,” Eve says.

Villanelle rolls her eyes. “O _kay_!” she says, and puts the can down. “Be like that. More for me.”

“You think you have everything,” Eve says. “But you have nothing.”

She looks at Eve, the sharp can opener still in her other hand. “Are you going to be like this all the time? Because this is really annoying.”

“What are you going to do,” Eve asks, flatly. “Stab me?”

Villanelle gestures with the opener, pressing her lips together. “Maybe.”

She eats her food straight from the can. There’s only an outdoor camp shower, and she doesn’t feel like heating water on the stove, so she stays in yesterday’s clothes, or maybe they're the day-before-yesterday’s. She opens the front door of the cabin, standing with her bare feet on the threshold, feeling the cold. 

When she turns around, Eve hasn’t moved. It annoys Villanelle, how still she can be now, how possessed.

“It’s going to get really cold here in a few months,” Villanelle says. “Cold and dark.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Eve says. “Does it bother you?”

“Of course not, I was born in Russia.”

“Right,” Eve says, and this time her smile is awful. Once a man smiled too much at Villanelle and she carved it bigger, wrapping right around his whole face, ear to missing ear, dripping blood. This smile is worse. “You can probably see Russia from here,” Eve says. “I guess that’s why you picked it.”

“Fuck you,” Villanelle says.

“Now you’ll never get the chance,” Eve says.

Villanelle reads, the rest of the day. She hears Eve snort when she takes the philosophy book out of her bag, but she doesn’t look up at her, doesn’t give her the satisfaction. She eats another can of beans as she reads, sloppy, getting food on the pages. It’s a dictionary and it makes for shitty reading, especially now she doesn’t have anything else on her mind. Life is always so boring, so fucking boring, when she doesn’t have a job to do.

She can feel Eve watching her the whole time she reads, and finally she feels the compulsion to look up. As she does, she has the sudden, equal conviction she’ll see nothing there, or something worse than nothing.

Eve is still there. The stain has covered her entire upper body, the green sweater just darkness now, red-black, wet.

“Good reading?” Eve asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken in hours, and her warm voice is cold now, like something is leeching out of her.

“Derrida,” Villanelle says. “I’ve been reading the D’s all day. It’s really boring.”

“Deconstruction is a parasite,” Eve says. “It presumes itself to be in the margins of life, toppling dichotomies, but it can’t exist without a text to act on.”

“You sound like this stupid book,” Villanelle says, rolling her eyes.

“Absence is presence,” Eve says. 

Villanelle looks at her. “I thought you said I had nothing. That I was empty.”

“Exactly,” Eve says.

When night finally falls, she keeps her eyes open as long as she can, trained on Eve. She thinks she sees the stain spreading lower, but maybe it’s only the darkness. Eve never closes her eyes.

The next day, Villanelle pulls her bed across the room, pressed right alongside Eve’s chair, and gets back in it. Eve’s looking down on her this way, chin still resting on her hand. She’s close enough to reach up and touch, but Villanelle doesn’t.

“Why did you come to Alaska?” Eve asks, in that thin, pale voice.

Villanelle settles her book on her chest, head propped on her pillow, an open can on the floor with a plastic spoon sticking out. She’s going to stink up the place, eating so many beans. “I told you. It’s beautiful. It’s far away from everything.”

“It’s not far away from Russia.”

“Fuck Russia.” Villanelle reaches down for a spoonful of beans. 

“You could still be there. In prison, in the hole.”

“I would have gotten out eventually,” Villanelle says. “I always do.”

“You should go to the shore,” Eve says, and her voice sounds less like her than it ever has. “You should look west over the water. Maybe you’ll see home.”

“I am home,” Villanelle says, and when Eve laughs it’s worse than her smile, worse than anything.

She reads all day, napping off and on. She feels like she has a cold coming, or a toothache, something bad. Something that hurts. It’s warm by the stove, but cold by Eve, and the feelings together are confusing, like her body doesn’t know what’s happening to it.

At one point she keeps reading the same paragraph over and over, not sure if her problem is being tired or the fading light or something else. She can’t make sense of the words, the text blurry and swimming, English letters obscure. _The turn_ , she keeps reading, _the turn the turn_.

“Being is essentially different from _a_ being,” Eve says, distant as a recorded voice.

“Are you reading over my shoulder?” Villanelle asks, grumpily.

“Heidegger was way up his own ass, but he wasn’t wrong,” Eve says. “The truth of being is not of our own production.”

Villanelle yawns, letting the book fall forward on her chest. “What does that mean?”

“Everything has a context. We create our being from openness.”

“Did you create yourself?” Villanelle asks, curiously. “Or did I create you?”

“When? Now, or then?”

Villanelle doesn’t answer. She’s falling asleep, the book heavy on her chest, weighing her down. _Maybe we created each other_ , she thinks.

The next day she goes to the shore. She puts on a thick coat, the hood fur lined, and climbs into the truck. Eve is already in the passenger seat. She doesn’t say anything on the long drive, and Villanelle plays loud rock music, filling the silence. When she gets out at the shore, there’s a figure down by the water line, and when she gets closer she sees it’s Eve.

Eve doesn’t turn around. Her clothes are all dark now, wet, shining. She’s like a seal, or something just born, her tangled hair blowing in the wind.

Villanelle looks at her, facing her from the side. Her small body and large head, the curving profile of her nose and lips, the round posture of her shoulders. The wildness of her black hair, unbound. She’s looked at Eve so many times, pictures and film, through windows and down alleyways, but they haven’t been like this very often, close enough to touch.

She doesn’t touch her. She faces west instead, towards the sea.

“You think we could swim across it?” she jokes, weakly. “You and me?”

 _No_ , Eve says, but not from beside her. It's in her head, like a memory.

In good weather, she could see Russia, though she’s not really sure. The far eastern peninsula, the edge of Siberia, maybe a smudge of mountains. Today there’s only mist and floating sea ice, and a few lonely white birds circling the flat grey sky.

 _This is so boring_ , Villanelle thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud. There’s no one here to hear her.


End file.
